Test automation for the 21st Century

Today, we live in a disrupted marketplace with a rapidly changing technology landscape that is influencing both the business and the consumer.

Markets globally are as different as they are similar with innovations, regulations and even cultural differences deciding on how solutions are implemented. FinTech has been in focus when it comes to finding new and simple ways to bank, lend and pay. This means that there is constant change to the IT ecosystem: quick rollout of experimental solutions, regulatory compliance and mandates. Fintech is also a domain where accuracy and correctness of information is of paramount importance.

The BFSI products and services industry has matured to the extent of extinction, inability to justify legacy systems that are slow to change, difficult to modify and expensive to support; escalating costs with no apparent increase in productivity or efficiency and then there is the common-sense approach of why not automate repetitive and seemingly mundane activities.

A couple of decades ago automation in IT was more in the category of wishful thinking. That is not the case anymore, companies increasingly use bots and algorithms to optimize their production and operations. Multiple disruptions in technology have created a plethora of frameworks that automate every aspect of IT, right from development to testing, deployment to monitoring. The pace and scope of what can be automated has reached a new level.

In the software industry automation has had a definitive positive impact, especially in the quality assurance and testing domain. There has been a significant rise in testing budgets over the last few years, this clearly indicates that there is now emphasis on efficient and scalable testing which means that such investments can now be employed productively in end-to-end test automation of the IT solutions. This symbolizes the growing awareness of QA and testing services among global enterprises. An increased budget allocation clearly indicates the correlation between quality and achieving better business outcomes.

With the ever-increasing demand for smart phones (Approximately 4.61 billion as on 2016) there has been a radical shift in the software industry towards mobile apps. The mobile app store (Apple and Google) has more than 4 million apps and this number is expected to increase in the future. Gartner’s prediction narrates that over 268 billion mobile downloads will generate an income of $77 billion in 2017. Digital transformation, Internet of things and cloud integration is on the rise, due to which cross communication between devices is becoming more important than ever. From an assurance perspective, a rigorous level of testing is required for these advancing systems to avoid any potential lapses in security and quality.

The distribution of test budget between human resources, hardware and software is shifting. Though there has been a considerable increase in budget allocation for testing tools, there have been major challenges in implementing the ideal test suite. There is now a need for a comprehensive one stop testing framework that caters to the end to end automation requirements, one that works across multiple channels (both traditional as well as new age), empower users to automate complex business scenarios effectively and efficiently, automate back-end network interfaces, web services, micro-services and custom integrations.

To conclude, test automation is now a core member of the IT tools required by 21st century financial institutions. Therefore, it would be good idea to both identify the right products, train the team and stay ahead of the curve when it comes to innovation and leadership in the new digital economy.

RenovITe recognizes the need for automation in testing. Test automation is a vital part of the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipeline. REXA is a test automation tool that revolutionizes the testing of payment products by enabling the end-to-end testing of solutions, from browser or mobile application through to payment authorisation schemes.

REXA is designed for used by the bank’s SME team or business team, with no coding knowledge required. BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) support accelerates the creation of test scripts to provide full coverage.